Why San Francisco Is the New Renaissance Florence

waderoush writes "Despite legitimate concerns over sky-high rents, Ellis Act evictions, Google Bus traffic, and the like, the San Francisco Bay Area is perhaps the most prosperous, comfortable, enlightened, stimulating, and generative place to live in Western history. For satisfying parallels, you'd have to look to a place like Florence and a time like the Renaissance, argues an Xconomy essay entitled From Cosimo to Cosmos: The Medici Effect in Culture and Technology. Today's coder-kings are working to reinvent economic structures in much the same way Renaissance painters, poets, architects, and scientists were trying to extend the framework they'd inherited from classical Greece and Rome. And in the role of the Medici family, long Florence's most powerful rulers and art patrons, we have people like Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Seth MacFarlane. Wait, what — Seth MacFarlane? Yes, the reboot of Carl Sagan's Cosmos starring Neil deGrasse Tyson (itself a tribute to the rise of science) wouldn't have happened without the involvement of a California media mogul. It's true that Silicon Valley can feel like Dante's Inferno if you're stuck in traffic on 101, or working 70-hour weeks as a code monkey at a doomed startup. But 'It would be unthinking, and ungrateful, to overlook the surplus we're reaping from the tech boom,' the essay argues."

Comments

Humble as always

[Anonymous Coward]

At least they don't have an over developed sense of their own importance.

Re: Humble as always

[rmdingler]

Generative...

Doesn't it seem like maybe they went one complimentary adjective too far?

Cheese and frickin' rice. There is nothing sadder than a group of tribalist asshats who believe in Zip Code superiority.

Fuck you.

[Anonymous Coward]

You pretentious cunt. San Francisco sucks.

Having lived in Sausalito and Mill Valley, let me

[Assmasher]

...just say STOP BLOWING YOURSELVES.

I love the Bay Area, lived there as a kid, lived there as an adult. It's beautiful, fun, and hideously expensive.

All that other crap you ascribe to it could be said about most large cities throughout the world.

Get over yourselves FFS.

It's also...

[HockeyPuck]

The most smug, pompous and expensive place to live....

It's the land of the have and have nots.

Want you kids to go to good schools in the area? Get ready to either send them to private school or fork out $1m plus for a 1600 sqft home with no land that was built in the early 60s.

If you didn't make in a killing in the previous dotcom bubble or the one we're in (Snapchat, i'm looking at you), enjoy mediocre housing and schools.

Re:It's also...

[jedidiah]

Plenty of people choose to avoid the goldrush mentality of California. That's why most people live other places. There's just lots more of "everywhere else". So supply and demand works out in our favor.

bah!

[lophophore]

Let me guess the city where the writer lives...

I'd argue that it is nothing like classical Florence, where the artists had sponsors. There's no analog in Silly Valley for that, none of the new rich are sponsoring great art, whether for themselves or the public.

Re:bah!

[Bevilr]

Yes, but I think the OP was referring to a very important difference. The rich in Florence were actively promoting the development of arts and culture. The rich in the Bay Area are simply collecting it. Sure, you are correct that much of it was private, but the architecture, and public buildings (and the paintings within them) were for everyone - or at least, so everyone could see how great they were. In that aspect I suppose they are similar, they both think/thought of themselves as the greatest city in the world. But where Florence contained one of the most impressive public buildings in the entire world (the Duomo was a public building and an engineering marvel), San Francisco has comparatively weak museums compared to cities like New York, London, Paris, or even Florence. Sure 3 com park, and free concerts exist, but nearly every large city in the world has that. New York's Shakespeare in the Park, and the wealth of other free public art and music in that city is significantly more impressive. Even more importantly, as wealth has flowed into the Bay Area, the artists and culture creators of the city have simply been priced out. That being said, the argument that software is our current society's art and that software developers are the Florentine Renaissance artists might have legs.

Fuckin' hype

[hessian]

Sorry, finding new ways to rent out your car through an iPhone app is not any kind of Renaissance.

If anything, it's the decline of computer science from world-changing to trivial amusements for trivial, pointless people.

Sure, SF ist great for the US, but just for them

[Anonymous Coward]

The most prosperous, comfortable and enlightened place in Western society is Scandinavia. And quite clearly so. You get all the liberalism of SF and more (most of their churches even conduct homosexual weddings), and far more prosperity and comfort due to the fairer distribution of income. Sure, there are less Zuckerbergs and whonots there. But the average guy, the guy cleaning the street or working at the butcher's is far more educated, content and wealthy.

Ive lived here for 15 years. Its bad-Getting worse

[Zeio]

Things are getting worse and worse in SF, SiVal/Peninsula and bay area in general.

The public schools are terrible, the cost of living is outrageous even with the high salaries, all families are dual income so most of the kids are latch-key, and my kids - we have to work overtime to protect them from how bad the kids are in general. There are a ton of richie rich kids who have money and they do bad things, drugs, etc. Cupertino, supposedly a great school district, polled kids and found that 75% had tried illegal drugs by 12th grade.

Also most of the universities here have non-California kids in ever increasing numbers. That means the land of milk and honey is not producing high end high school graduates.

I have a plan to relocate out of here within 18 months now. I refuse to say where because I can only hope that others wont follow and bring the pain and suffering and horribly low standard of living with them yet again.

And I've recently been to japan and switzerland. The public transportations STINKs here, the quality of life is far lower than either of those two places and in they have better primary/grade schools in both those places.

This is not living here. There is also little room for a family lifestyle. And the facebook pop has caused a lot of places to be one-percenter-only. All houses under 2 million are horrible, shabby and full of asbestos and mold. Built in the 1950s/60s to a very low standard.

Roads are fairly in poor repair despite there being no winter. Certain areas are crime ridden but the houses are 700K+. Schools - even greatschools-10 schools and blue ribbon schools - are a joke. They are a shadow of schools Ive seen in other places.

Please, never come here thinking you will be better off. Coming here is just like playing the lottery. Dont even think being smart will make you wealthy enough to get a real life here. you have to be either very lucky , or smart and lucky. Nobody earns their way to the top. Also there is a big time old boys club mentality. Inferior people will be much farther than you even if you work 80 hours a week and bleed for work.

The bay area is no longer about technology anymore. its about big gigantic pan national business and the monetization of the internet.

Google has the best, smartest, most driven brightest people in the world working day and night to not cure cancer, or invent new things (they bought a thermostat company for 3billion) but to Shovel Ads in Your Face. Thats it. Same with F-book

Hardly noble.

Welcome to SillyCON Valley.

Enlightened? Seriously?

[QilessQi]

You mean "enlightened" like this coder-king?

http://valleywag.gawker.com/ha...

And prosperous? Well, I guess if you don't count the homeless human "trash" or the "degenerates" he and his enlightened friends complain about. Oh, those pesky poor people... if it weren't for them, SF would be even more of a "comfortable, enlightened, stimulating" city. Why must he and our other coder-kings be forced to look at them? It is thoroughly uncomfortable, I tell you! It completely ruins his stimulating experience of driving a BMW to Fisherman's Wharf for an enlightened lunch!

Can something be done to help this poor Medici-esque man-mogul? I hope he or one of his fellow coder-kings is even now "working to reinvent economic structures", as you say. I'm certain there is a Bitcoin solution to all this. After all, if we dispense with dollar bills entirely, the computer-less poor won't have any way to beg for cryptocurrency and they'll have to return to wherever they came from.

But there I go, being "unthinking and ungrateful", as usual...

Bullocks

[Berkyjay]

I've been here for 10 years. I arrived a few years after the dotcom crash and I fell in love with the city. And it wasn't the city that tech built. It was the city that was recovering from the tech devastation. It was a city of artists and just plain old regular people doing their thing. This was still the place to go to get your visual effects done or to get a video game made. Rent was high, but not beyond what a college student couldn't manage with a serving job. It had old tried and true spots that survived the ups and downs. New spots would come about, but they seemed to grow organically and not sprout up and become overcrowded due to hype. It was almost like it was our little secret. But then that secret got out, and the money flowed in and along with it came the greed and the shallowness. Prices skyrocketed, people were driven out. All to make room for people who don't care about community or the beauty of a "lived in" city. They want to be perceived as cool and as important. They don't want to see the homeless and they have no patience for public transportation or a long commute. And finally they write stupid comments like the one above all in an effort to boost their sense of self worth. Because in the end, they are all miserable because they realize deep down inside that most of what they do is all filler for the world at large. They aren't saving lives, they aren't curing disease, they aren't feeding the poor. It's all just distractions.

San Francisco's turning into Upper East Side

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been living in San Francisco for 10+ years. Sorry, Wade Roush & Ed Lee, but San Francisco doesn't need tax breaks for startups or 1/1/1 programs. We need the rich people in this area (including myself and my wife who are both in tech) to pay way more taxes so that we can balance things out a little bit and make the city livable for artists, waiters, musicians, etc. Awesome breakthroughs typically happen when fields intersect, and people bring experiences and impressions from one field into another. San Francisco's power has come from its diversity.

Ed Lee & Ron Conway, the entire San Francisco city is turning into Upper East Side New York. It's madness, and I can't imagine it's going to work out well long term for anyone, including the tech companies and startups that the current economic policies appear to be optimized for. How much awesome creative work is coming out of the Upper East Side? Zero.

Twitter is a great example of misguided policy. I love the service that the company provides and have many friends who work there, but why the hell are they getting tax breaks? It's lunacy. If they don't want to "give back" they can set up shop somewhere else. If they'd rather move to Fresno where they get a tax break, or Austin where there's cheaper talent they can do that. The reason they won't is that they want the stuff that makes SF awesome, its diversity. By creating these types of unnecessary economic incentives you're eroding the very thing that makes SF great to begin with. Why try to compete in cost when the competitive advantage is creativity and diversity?

m

Re:Having lived in Sausalito and Mill Valley, let

[lister king of smeg]

Thank you. I have been seeing this bull shit about the wonderful city of San Fransisco blahblahbalh... for the past couple of weeks on various tech sites and it is getting to be fucking annoying. Especially while the same danm sites report on the Luddite bullshit they have been doing.

You want to know what San Fransicso really is?

San Francisco is city that pushes a go green eco freindly message thats people protest when a tech company tries to create a mass transit system to cut traffic and emissions. The city that objects to innovators moving there and ruining their culture by virtue of living there. The city who populous mobbed the house of googles self driving car team head for no good reason. They sound more like a liberal arts version of the old black and white monster movie peasant mob chasing down scientists and innovators with pitchforks and torches.

circle-jerk nonsense.

[rogoshen1]

what a bunch of shit. comparing getting people to view ads or click 'like' for inane bullshit consumerist garbage is not even the same fucking game as the renaissance.

unintentional self-parody

[globaljustin]

today's coder-kings are working to reinvent economic structures in much the same way Renaissance painters, poets

today's coder-kings !!!

what is almost as hilarious is that 'Soulskill' posted the summary without a HINT of irony!

San Francisco is overrated

[ebusinessmedia1]

San Francisco is a nice place to live if you are making a good wage, but it's been stripped of personality. The thing that made San Francisco an interesting city to live in left, years ago. For instance, middle class persons can no longer afford to live or raise a family here. If you are a teacher, nurse, social worker, restaurant manager, small cafe owner, policeman, fireman, librarian, hotel worker, truck driver, car salesperson, etc,. etc. - you cannot buy in. Add to that the sense of snobby entitlement that has begun to sink in here. The place is filling up with upper-middle-class types who are nice enough, but there is a "sameness" about them that kills the heady diversity San Francisco was known for. Last, comparing San Francisco or the Bay Area to Florence is ridiculous. Seriously, stop with the fawning praise. The one thing that does separate San Francisco from a lot of other cities is its physical beauty. It's a stunning place. People want to live here because of that. If you look in the SOMA district where all the techies are living and working, it's become a stultifying, boring, architectually uninteresting place. Comparisons to Florence are self serving and reflect the degree of disconnectedness and lack of historical perspective shared by the tech industry. Everything is "now". San Francisco doesn't hold a candle to Florence, even today!